The cyber security firm IntelCrawler has identified the malware that caused the massive data breach at Target during the 2013 holiday shopping season and unveiled that the same malware may has also been used to attack at least six more U.S. merchants.

The Los-Angeles based cyber intelligence company discovered that the age of the 'BlackPOS' malware author is close to 17 years old and the thatt the first sample of it was created in March 2013.

The specific malware was responsible for the recent data breach at Target which the retailer now admits affected 70 million customers. It was also used to attack upscale department store Neiman Marcus.

The first report on this malware was done in the beginning of spring by Andrew Komarov, IntelCrawler CEO. Now Komarov has alerted law enforcement, Visa Inc and intelligence teams at several large banks about ongoing cyber attacks at merchants across the United States whose credit card processing systems are infected with the same type of malicious software.

According to own sources of IntelCrawler, the first infected Point-of-Sales environments by BlackPOS were in Australia, Canada and the US. During that time, IntelCrawler claims that the author of the malware has sold more then 40 builds of BlackPOS to cybercriminals from Eastern Europe and other countries.